Online Joint AIAI and Teaching Hours seminar - 5 June 2023 - Talk by Prof. Mike Sharples

Speaker:     Prof. Mike Sharples  

Title:             Large Language Models in Higher Education: Opportunities and Issues

Large Language Models such as ChatGPT are disrupting education. Students, teachers and academics can access software that writes essays, summarises scientific texts, produces lesson plans, engages in conversations, and drafts academic papers. These are already being embedded into office tools.  I will introduce the capabilities and limitations of current Large Language Models and discuss how they are impacting education, including emerging policy. I will suggest new roles for AI in supporting teaching, learning and assessment, including Dynamic Assessment (to assess each student’s current potential to learn), Possibility Engine (AI generates alternative ways of expressing an idea), Socratic Opponent (to develop an argument), and Guide on the Side (to navigate physical and conceptual spaces). Rather than seeing generative AI solely as a challenge to traditional education, we can prepare students for a future where AI is a tool for creativity, to be operated with great care and awareness of its limitations.

Bio:

Mike Sharples is Emeritus Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK. He gained a PhD from the Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh on Cognition, Computers and Creative Writing. His expertise involves human-centred design and evaluation of new technologies and environments for learning. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. As Academic Lead for the FutureLearn company, he led the design of its social learning approach. He founded the Innovating Pedagogy report series and is author of over 300 papers in the areas of educational technology, learning sciences, science education, human-centred design of personal technologies, artificial intelligence and cognitive science. His recent books are Practical Pedagogy: 40 New Ways to Teach and Learn and Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers both published by Routledge, and An Introduction to Narrative Generators, published by Oxford University Press.